Monday, 28 March 2016

“All happy families are
alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” is the opening line of
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and I think this holds true for family
history. It is more often the sad and
bad stories that left records and, I think, make the most interesting reading. Happy families who lived contentedly in one
location for generations didn’t always leave much trace of their lives. This is not a story of a happy family.

I discovered my ancestor Mary
Ann Simmonds* early on in my research but I have only very recently uncovered
the full story of her family, which I have decided to cover in three blog
entries. She is of particular interest
to me as she was the last ancestor of her generation where I couldn’t find both
parents.

Years before the days of digitised
records, when the 1881 Census index was published on microfiche, I found a Mary
Ann Elliston living with her husband and children in West Ham. It said she was 24, so born around 1856, and from
Lynn, Norfolk. I rightly assumed that
Lynn was King’s Lynn. Also in the house was
her father William Simmonds, born in Lincoln; extended family members in census
records are always an exciting find. However,
it took me a while to discover the red herrings.

I was not able to find a
likely birth for Mary Ann around 1856 in the registry office indexes. I did discover that Simmonds is a challenging
name to research because of the many spelling variations – y instead of I, an
optional d and varied number of m’s. Also,
indexers sometimes transcribe capital S’s as L.

Mary Ann Simmonds married
George Elliston 1 February 1874 in West Ham, Essex. The marriage certificate said she was of full
age, which did not fit with the 1881 census index, and listed her father as
William Simmonds, which did.

I resolved the issue of Mary
Ann’s age after careful checking of the original 1881 census record and by getting
a copy of her death certificate. Mary
Ann died 7 Feb 1885 from small pox, aged only about 35, leaving 3 young
children, Alice (my great grandmother), George and Walter. Small pox vaccination was made compulsory in
the UK in 1853 for new born children, so Mary Ann had missed out on this by just
a couple of years.

Confirming Mary Ann’s age
didn’t help me with locating a birth record.

My next step was to search
other censuses for Mary Ann and her family.
I haven’t found her in the 1871 census.
I assume she was working as a servant and that the age and place of
birth place given were incorrect. I have
come across a few possibilities. I did
find William Simmonds*, a widower from Upwell, Norfolk, living with children
Caroline, Lydia, Susanna and Thomas, all younger than Mary Ann.

I was easily able to locate
birth certificates for Caroline and Lydia, thanks to their less common
names. The certificates both give their
mother’s name as Rebecca Harding. I have
not yet found a marriage certificate for William Simmonds and Rebecca Harding (or
any other variation of their names).

It took some imaginative
searches, making good use of wildcards and filters, to find Rebecca and her
daughters in the 1861 census. They are
listed by their initials only, living in the Wisbech workhouse in
Cambridgeshire and the surname indexed as Semmons, although I think it looks
like Simmons in the original record.
Mary Ann’s place of birth was given as King’s Lynn. Wisbech poor law union covered the Norfolk parishes
of Upwell and Outwell, the other Simmonds children were born. A workhouse was where people went when they
had no money and no other options. Life
in work houses was regimented and tough by did provide food, shelter and
sometimes work. I have not yet found
William Simmonds in the 1861 census. It
is possible that William had moved away to find work, leaving his family in the
workhouse until he could support them. This
seems likely given that son/brother Thomas was born around 1862 in Woolwich,
Kent.

Some more inventive searching
led me to a Rebecca Hardy living in King’s Lynn in 1851. I have not identified William Simmonds. I will cover the details of Rebecca’s story
in part 2, however the key points from the 1851 census for this story are:

It was taken on 30
March.

The household
lists Ann Taylor as head with John Briton, William Smith and Rebecca Hardy as
lodgers, listed in that order.

Ann and Rebecca
are listed as Concubines. As far as I
can work out, that may have just meant they were living with men they were not
married to. They had neighbours who were
listed as prostitutes…

I now knew that Mary Ann must
have been born sometime between 30 March 1851 and mid-1852, as her sister
Caroline was born in July 1853. Wondering
if Mary Ann might have been illegitimate, I searched for a Hardy or Harding
birth certificate. Mary Ann Hardy was
born 7 December 1851 in the Union House, St Margaret’s King Lynn (a workhouse). As well as finding a birth certificate, I
also found a record of the birth in the Norfolk poor law records on
Ancestry.com. Single women often ended
up at workhouse hospitals for their lying in (i.e. labour). Readers who are
good at maths and biology might have worked out that Mary Ann was born roughly 9 months after
the 1851 census was taken. This led me
to the conclusion that William Smith is the most likely candidate to be her
biological father. Given that Mary Ann
was known by her step father’s surname and he lived with her family later in
life rather than with any of his younger children, I wonder if Mary Ann had any
idea of the circumstances surrounding her birth.

In spite of her difficult
early years, my hope is that Mary Ann found happiness during her marriage.

*I have stuck with one
spelling variation for names in this story so as to not confuse the reader,
however in the original records I have come across other variants of several
names. I have also referred to my
ancestor as Mary Ann Simmonds, rather than Hardy, as that is the name she was
mostly known by.

Monday, 14 March 2016

My ancestor Robert Pearson spent
much of his life living on his farm in the parish of Kirkland near Penrith,
Cumberland, at the base of Cross Fell, the highest peak in the north
Pennies. The area is renowned for thick
fogs and the Helm Wind, which makes a shrieking noise and is the only named
wind in England. Thanks to Google street
view, I did a virtual tour of Kirkland and I suspect the area has changed
little in hundreds of years. The church
appears to be in a field in the middle of no-where and there are a few old farm
houses in nearby. It looks like
something out of Wuthering Heights. But was
Robert Pearson’s life lonely and remote?
I think not. He had 13 children.

Robert Pearson was born about
1766, possibly the son of William Pearson and Sarah Monkhouse who was baptised
24 August 1766 at St Michael’s Appleby in Westmoreland. I need to do more research to confirm this. There are several other possible Robert
Pearson’s baptised in the area around that time.

My first certain record of Robert
is his marriage to Anne Blenkinsop*on 9 August 1793, in the parish of Kirkland
near Penrith in what was then Cumberland.
Their first child, John was born early in 1796 and their last child, my
ancestor Jane, was born in 1821. They had
five sons and eight daughters. At least
one of the daughters died young, I am not sure about what happened to many of
the others; Pearson is a common name and so challenging to research. Most of the children had common given names
too, including an Eliza and an Elizabeth, both living with their parents in
1841. One daughter had a less common
name, Tamar, which might be a helpful clue for further research. A John Pearson married Tamar Braithwait in
1724, in Kirkland. Also of interested ins their daughter Frances, as this name
was passed down the family, as can be seen from the lineage outlined below.

As mentioned, Robert was a
farmer. On his death certificate he was
described as a Yeoman, which suggests he owned land rather than leased it. I don’t know what he farmed but his third son,
Joseph Pearson, seems to have inherited the farm. The 1851 and 1861 censuses say that Joseph
was a farmer of 57 acres.

By 1841, Robert Pearson and
Ann seem to have retired to Newbiggin, near Dacre, on the other side of Penrith
to Kirkland, although the census still lists him as a farmer. Just to complicate matters, Newbiggin is also
the name of a Westmorland parish next to Kirkland. There are several Newbiggin’s in the area, so
it is necessary to be extra careful to make sure I am researching in the right
location.

Robert Pearson died 11 December
1845 of natural decay. His age was given
as 80, so my guess is that natural decay is another term for old age.

Robert left a will, but I
have not yet obtained a copy of it. Maybe
it will fill in some gaps. Researching
this family is certainly a challenge given the common names.

*or Blenkinship. There are a lot of variant spellings for this
surname.

About Me

I am an Aussie living in England. For a few years I have been writing as a hobby and thought it was time to share my writing more widely. I have a blog for fiction and a blog for stories from my family's history.